“But it talks and cries. You said that.”
“Uh-huh. Little words and little crying noises.” Chandra paused, giving her attention to her steaming creamy. “This is really good.”
I nodded. “And this is a really good story you’re telling me; the question is whether it’s a really true story.”
“You didn’t say true, you said what I think.”
“You think a black thing crawls into your mother’s room late at night.”
Looking very serious, she nodded. “I’ve seen it.”
“What do you do when that happens?”
“I yell at it to get out. Sometimes I throw shoes or bottles. Whatever’s handy.”
“Yelling must wake up your mother.”
Chandra nodded. “It does. She screams and screams. Then the black thing runs away.”
“Out the door?”
That took thought. “Sort of out the door or something. It goes away.”
“Sort of out the door?”
“It can be hard to tell. It could be out the other door or out a window. Maybe into the closet.”
When I said nothing she added, “Will you sleep with my mother tonight instead of me? Maybe you can see it.”
I considered that one. “You sleep in her bed, in bed with her?”
Chandra nodded.
“I can’t do that, it’s against the rules. I have to sleep on the floor next to her bed.”
“I’d like to sleep in my own room sometimes.”
“I understand, and I will be proud to sleep on the floor beside a fully human’s bed.”
About that time I spotted the three-story white house with the widow’s walk. “I’d like to propose a theory for your consideration. It seems to me that your mother may suffer from paranoid schizophrenia. It’s not uncommon for schizophrenics—paranoid schizophrenics, particularly—to infect other members of their immediate family. Those so infected are not actually schizophrenic and often recover quickly when separated from the true paranoid schizophrenic. But they come to believe the schizophrenic’s delusions until such separation occurs.”
“You think my mother’s crazy, and she’s made me crazy, too.”
“I’m asking you if it isn’t possible.” I shivered, wishing that gloves and a heated cap had come with my new jacket.
“The black thing’s really there. I see it almost every night.” Chandra sounded sure of her ground.
“Really there, but you can’t see how it gets in?”
Chandra shook her head.
“Surely you must see how it gets out.”
“It just goes away. It isn’t there anymore.” Chandra paused, and audibly swallowed. “It sort of fades into the dark.”
Like a dream, I thought. It seemed impolite to say it aloud, so I didn’t.
Chandra’s mother’s bedroom was on the ground floor, with two narrow, snow-dotted windows looking out and down the other side of the long slope that Chandra and I had just climbed. “Please take a chair, Mr. Smithe.” There was a spindly, armless chair near the bed. I sat down on it gingerly, trying to keep from staring at the big, dark eyes and high cheekbones of the white-faced woman between the sheets.
“You are newly come to our village library, Mr. Smithe? That’s what Chandra tells me.”
“Correct. We got here yesterday, Millie Baumgartner”—the pale woman in the big bed tried to wave the name away—“Rose Romain, and I,” I finished.
“You know nothing of Polly’s Cove?”
“Correct. I have never been here before, and I had never heard of it.”
“That’s unfortunate. On the other hand, a new man, a younger man…”
“As is often the case. I take it you didn’t check me out in order to quiz me about my books.”
The pale woman spoke to Chandra. “Please leave us, darling. Ask Mrs. Heuse to make you something for lunch.”
When the door had shut behind Chandra, her mother said, “I would prefer to question you about a book of mine.” She indicated a large leather-bound volume on her bedside table. “Look inside the back cover, please.”
It was a map, dotted with symbols I did not recognize.
I said, “May I carry this to the window?”
She nodded. “As long as you don’t leave it there.”
“I won’t.”
The big book was even heavier than I had expected, but I rested the top on the windowsill. When I had finished looking, I closed its faded black leather cover and brought it back to the little bedside table.
The pale woman opened her eyes. “You were thorough, Mr. Smithe. I like that.”
“Not really. You know my name and I ought to have learned yours from Chandra, but I didn’t. May I ask it now?”
For the first time, she smiled.
“You looked at the bookplate in front. I saw that.”
“I did, and I felt certain it wasn’t yours. Was I mistaken?”
“No. Someday I must remember to ask you what made you so confident. My name is Adah Fevre.”
I nodded and thanked her.
“What did you think of the map?”
“It may be old, though clearly not as old as the paper it’s drawn on.” I paused. “Do you want a lecture on papers?”
Mrs. Fevre nodded, smiling. “I have nothing but time, Mr. Smithe. Time, and you. Please go ahead.”
“Very well.” I drew a long breath. “Modern papers are made of ponticwood fibers. Ponticwood is grown for various purposes, then sawed or split, turned on a lathe or machined by a router, drilled perhaps, sanded, and so forth. The sawdust, chips, and discarded bits used to be burned to generate steam. Now they’re salvaged and pulped. Additives depend on the use to which the paper is to be put. When the proper ones have been mixed in, the pulp slurry is rolled into sheets and the sheets dried on heated rollers. Dry, they may or may not be coated; the coating (if any) depends upon the use for which the paper is intended.”
“Continue, please. I’ll interrupt when I have a question.”
“The map paper is not that kind. It contains fibers from some fabric, probably nylon. Presumably, rags were cut up and mixed with the ponticwood stock. It would be both possible and fairly easy to make paper like that today, but there’s no reason to do it. Such paper is durable, but some modern papers are even more durable. Given cool, dark, dry storage, their lives are estimated in tens of thousands of years. So why bother?”
“I understand,” Mrs. Fevre said. “Please continue.”
“As you wish. The map is yellowed along three edges. Only three, not four. The unyellowed edge is farthest from the spine of the book.”
“I don’t understand that at all.”
“Yellowing results from exposure to sunlight. When a piece of paper forms a page in a book, it may yellow on three sides, the top, the bottom, and one long edge. Those three edges may see the sun. The edge bound into the spine never does.”
“You think this sheet was formerly a page in a book.”
“I do. Not a page of the book in which it is glued now, however; it’s thicker stock, just to begin with. It would be interesting to pull it loose and see what’s printed on the other side, if anything. I would not attempt that without your permission, however.”